Sunday, October 10, 2010

Last weekend MPH had a Members Special weekend. Promotions include a 20% discount on all books, and this very interesting Bagful of Knowledge.

Isn't that so cool? I thought so too. What a quirky concept. What was the idea behind the bag? Is it to limit the amount of books you can buy at 70%?

Of course I was itching to go have a look, so we went to MPH Subang Parade. Before buying the bag, I thought to check out the books that qualified for the Bagful of Knowledge promo. Only if there were many good books with such savings would be worth it to get the bag. Was it mainly fiction books? Or business books?

Thank goodness I decided to look for the qualified books first!

After looking through the store for books marked with the Bagful of Knowledge stickers and still not finding any, I asked a store assistant. "You have to buy the bag first." she explained. I told her I wanted to look at the books first so she pointed me to the some bins with a jumble of books. "Only those books in the bin are in this promo."

It was a sad jumble of books in sorry state, bargain type books that nobody usually buys and is usually carted out at warehouse sales in the 70% category. What was the point of the bag in the first place if the books are not good deals at all! They're not even good books!

I feel so cheated. It was not worth the trip to the mall at all. Bagful of Crap, more like.
It was so disappointing that something so beautifully marketed turned out so... lame.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

My favorite character in Yann Martell's Life of Pi is Richard Parker the tiger. I've always thought the magnificent tiger's magnificent name adds a certain added oomph to the character. A tiger named Benny might not be as cool doing the same things a Richard Parker is doing.

But WOW. I found out there's a reason Yann Martell named Richard Parker so. Richard Parker is the name of several people in real life and fiction who became shipwrecked and subsequently were cannibalized by their fellow seamen. Yann Martell surmised "So many Richard Parkers had to mean something" and thus named his shipwrecked tiger Richard Parker.

In Edgar Allan Poe's only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, Richard Parker is a mutinous sailor on the whaling ship Grampus. After the ship capsizes in a storm, he and three other survivors draw lots upon Parker's suggestion to kill one of them to sustain the others. Parker then gets cannibalized.

In 1846, the Francis Spaight foundered at sea. Apprentice Richard Parker was among the twenty-one drowning victims of that incident.

In 1884, the yacht Mignonette sank. Four people survived, drifted in a life boat, and finally killed one of them, the cabin boy Richard Parker, for food. This led to the R v Dudley and Stephens criminal case.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

I came across the term while browsing Nancy Pearl's Book Lust. She groups her reading recommendation into little chunks and one such chunk was under the heading roman-fleuve.

[Quote Wiki] A roman-fleuve (French, literally "river-novel") refers to an extended sequence of novels of which the whole acts as a commentary for a society or an epoch, and which continually deals with a central character, community or a saga within a family. The river metaphor implies a steady, broad dynamic lending itself to a perspective. Each volume makes up a complete novel by itself, but the entire cycle exhibits unifying characteristics.

Nancy adds that in such novels the sum of the total narrative experience is greater than its individual parts, and no one novel is self contained. As opposed to sets with same characters but standalone stories per novel, for example mystery novels featuring the same central detective character.

The term roman-fleuve was first used for books by Marcel Proust, but more familiar to most of us would be The Lord of the Rings set by J.R.R. Tolkien. Even if you've never read the books, you would be familiar with the concept having to watch all 3 movies to get the full story.

Time to get started on my Philip Pullman His Dark Materials roman-fleuve. And re-read Harry Potter back to back, now that the whole set is out.

But although I've stopped blogging about books and reading for a couple of years, I did not stop reading. I've changed my reading patterns, changed my taste in books, changed my reading goals, changed my anal don't bend my book spine attitude, but the undying love for the written words and the smell of books is still there.

And I'm starting to remember why I started a book blog in the first place. Because I want to share my joy (and gripes) of books and reading with you.